Leopoldo Franchetti's brand of colonialism envisioned agricultural productivity as the remedy to the biopolitical fragmentation of Italians. Fertile land and the nourishment colonial bodies and would-be soldiers stood to extract from it functioned as prophylaxis—defending the razza italiana both from further mutilation (departure for foreign lands) and from its decimation by local opposition. While the biopolitical rhetoric of defense may be almost self-evident in the colonial context, what happens to it when the potential threat comes not from outside, but from within? For Italy's preeminent Darwinian physician, public hygienist, and anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza (1831–1910), the Italian body politic was sick. Pathological bodies produced pathological politics, and ensured Italy's inferiority on the European, and global, stage. His answer to preventing the spread of a generalized infection was to write—hundreds of volumes, popular manuals, and pamphlets that would educate Italians about correcting and maintaining the proper function of their bodies. If the avowed goal of Mantegazza's popular scientific production was the protection of life, his final novel L'Anno 3000. Sogno (The Year 3000. A Dream), published in 1897, illustrates how that protection becomes its negation through the futuristic invention of immunitary technologies that “eliminate” pathological newborns in order to strengthen the remainder of the population.

Writing as Prophylaxis

In 1868, as Italian troops continued their struggle to establish Italy as a territorial whole, Paolo Mantegazza published a best-selling epistolary romance novel that inaugurated his ascent to literary celebrity. Un giorno a Madera. Una pagina dell'igiene d'amore (A Day in Madeira: A Page from the Hygiene of Love) traces the melancholy and ultimately unreproductive love affair of its protagonists, Emma and William, and can be situated within emergent discourses of national public hygiene, which were shaped in large part by Mantegazza and his colleagues at the Universities of Pavia and Florence. By 1899, there were more than twenty editions of Madera in circulation (Pasini 249–250).Through the epistolary exchange that constitutes the bulk of the novel, readers learn that frail Emma is the last survivor in a family ravaged by tuberculosis.